DIRT: Intersectional Approaches to Messiness

Archives are dirty. Though scholars have critiqued the idea of an archive as dusty and disorganized, their contents often challenge the very boundaries that try to contain them. The 2017 Activist Media Archives Symposium interrogates the idea of DIRT by “departing from the planned coherent borders of the ‘archival’” and refocusing our attention to the “trashy, dirty, disgusting, and untidy disorganization of bodies, things, and emotions” (Manalansan 2014: 94). This symposium brought together artistic, activist, and scholarly communities to highlight these kinds of messy, dirty, and alternatively-organized archival practices.

KEYNOTE: “Canada’s migrant worker programs, a managed model of migration or a system of indentureship and apartheid: stories from below”, Chris Ramsaroop, Justicia for Migrant Workers

1. In the thick of it: Dirty Theories and Practices
“Leveraging the Leak: Possibilities and Threats in Contesting Boundaries”
Alysse Kushinski, York University

“A Turn to Mud”
Ned Randolph, University of California San Diego

“Settler Colonial Archives: The Case of Canada”
Jane Griffith, Ryerson University

“Poetics of Population [working title]”
Madhuri Shukla, The New School and Timothy Nest, McGill University

2. Operation Dirt: Perspectives on Toronto
“Other Histories and Alternative Archives: About Alternative Toronto”
Lilian Radovac, University of Toronto

“Sorting Through Pages of Resistance: Learning from Anti-Racist Activities in 1990s Toronto”
Sylvia Nowak, Ryerson University

“Airing Dirty Laundry: Messiness of Internal Differences with the LGBTQ Movement”
Nick Mule, York University.

3. Digging Up Dirt in the Archive: Activism through Research Creation
“Invisible Disabilities: Where are the Artistic Archives?”
Anne-Marie Santerre, York University

“Uncanny Aesthetics of a Forensic Archive: Katarzyna Mirczak’s ether project”
Justyna Hanna Budzik, University of Washington

“Revisiting the Family Tree through the Memory and Trace of Home Movies”
Joëlle Rouleau, Université de Montréal

4. Dirt Everywhere: Expanded Archives
“Space, Tooling, and the Internet of things – Dirt and Agency in Archives Old and New”
Daniel Elkin, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

“Staging Bemusing Narratives and Rhizomatic Archives with Banksy and Punchdrunk”
Natalja Chestopalova, York and Ryerson Universities

“Online Images, Space, and the City of Ciudad Juarez: The “Feminicidos Reclassification” Project Archive”
Chiara Bernardi, University of Stirling

Ad Hoc #5: Passiflora

The studio’s 2017 symposium DIRT: Intersectional Approaches to Messiness opened with a screening of the rarely-screened and controversial National Film Board documentary Passiflora (1985, Canada, 85 min.) on 16mm.

Passiflora is an experimental documentary ostensibly about the time Pope John Paul II and Michael Jackson visited Montreal within a week of each other in 1984. Produced for an unheard of $1 million, the film caught the ire of top NFB brass for its anarchic depiction of the margins of Montreal society. Its depiction of gay men, trans women, civil protest, and frank discussions of divorce, abortion, and feminism were — and still are — considered controversial. But rather than censor the film outright, the NFB chose to not provide English subtitles for the French-language film for its premiere at the Toronto Festival of Festivals (now known as TIFF) in 1986, effectively ensuring that it would rarely be screened.

The film still remains officially unsubtitled and has been all but lost within the archives. In 2008, the film was hacked by Jon Davies, who developed “digital subtitles” to be simultaneously projected over the film. Our screening of Passiflora will feature these unofficial digital English subtitles.